


sexy french depression

by counterheist



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Depressionish, Domesticity, Fluff and Angst, Gen, Insecurity, Loneliness, M/M, Makkachin is Viktor's Best Friend, Viktor's Sadness Jamboree, World's Smartest Dog
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-18
Updated: 2018-02-18
Packaged: 2019-03-20 16:43:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,588
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13721814
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/counterheist/pseuds/counterheist
Summary: Viktor’s formal education ends on his fifteenth birthday.





	sexy french depression

**Author's Note:**

  * For [spookyfoot](https://archiveofourown.org/users/spookyfoot/gifts).



> For spooky, who deserves a lot of rest, and who probably expected something a lot different from this.  
>  **Prompt:** valedictorian makkachin WORLDS SMARTEST DOG!!! produced by: victor nikiforov.
> 
> I tried something different here. I hope it’s not too far from the normal characterization for you to enjoy.

Viktor’s formal education ends on his fifteenth birthday. The moment passes without his notice, without his consultation or involvement, as he idly practices change bracket figures and waits for his coach to emerge from the rink’s back office. He'd rather practice jumps, but the others are busy with Madame Baranovskaya and he’s not allowed to without a spotter, especially not so close to Junior Nationals. Everyone expects him to take gold there, himself included. It's not something he can risk.

So he focuses on his edges.

He learns about the twist to his young fate hours later, after he’s packed his skates away properly and washed up, and he meets the knowledge with a childish curiosity. Will he get to skate all the time now, whenever he wants? Will he never need to read a book again, or wake up at five to get in two hours of practice before lessons, or memorize the date of the Battle of Smolensk? Will he ever see his classmates again?

“This is for your future,” Yakov Mikhailovich explains later on the drive to Viktor’s dormitory, purposefully answering none of Viktor’s questions. He is a wall of a man, uncompromising and not open to argument despite Viktor’s best attempts, and so their conversation ends with the solid flick of his key in the ignition, with the dull thunk of the driver side door unlatching. Yakov Mikhailovich walks inside to talk to the administration office, and then waits outside in his car for Viktor to gather his things from his room. Viktor doesn’t have many things.

He dallies anyway because he can tell Yakov Mikhailovich does not want him to.

“But Coach Yakov,” Viktor says once he’s returned to the passenger seat of Yakov Mikhailovich’s car, stubborn to the last. “They said I had been accepted to the Reserve School.” Even Viktor, flighty and impossible, knows that acceptance to an Olympic Reserve School is a high honor. An invitation is as good as a command. If even Viktor knows this, Coach Yakov Mikhailovich Feltsman must have it seeped through to the marrow of his bones.

And yet here Viktor is, a secondary school dropout.

“ _That school_ has produced two Olympic medalists in Men’s Singles in the last twenty years,” Yakov Mikhailovich gruffly tells the road, and Viktor by way of there being no one else in the car to listen. “Two. Do you know how many of my skaters have gone on to medal at the Olympics?”

Viktor does.

And so here Viktor is, a secondary school dropout.

Not as much changes as he expects. He still isn't allowed to skate whenever he wants, because of Coach Yakov’s strict training schedules and rest day timetables. He still has to read, because Madame Baranovskaya says there is beauty to be found in the written word and Viktor lacks depth. He wakes when Coach Yakov tells him to. He gets used to the early morning chill. He has his rink mates still, and he always spent more time with them than with his classmates anyway.

(The Battle of Smolensk, at least, no longer has anything to do with his life.)

He has the ice.

The ice, Viktor tells himself during those cold, early mornings, means more to him than anything else. More than tentative friendships or favorite teachers or sitting in the sun. Or his parents, who call Coach Yakov monthly and who sometimes ask for updates from Viktor directly. The only thing that comes even close to the ice in Viktor’s opinion is winning.

There is, though, the matter of the dog.

Viktor’s former dormitory did not allow the boys to keep pets. It was a reasonable rule and Viktor never cared to flaunt or challenge it, too busy flaunting and challenging the much sillier rules, like curfews and dress codes. The stray kittens hidden in the second floor utility closet by a group of boys in Viktor’s year were loud and smelly. The dog smuggled underneath a roommate’s bed was messy and frustrating and never listened when Viktor told it to stop chewing on his clothes.

All of the animals were found and confiscated at one point or another, and Viktor could not bring himself to care.

Viktor does not care for the dog either.

It is a small mass of curls, all ears and paws and rapt focus on everything Viktor does. He catches the dog watching him breathe, sometimes, its tail carrying the rhythm. He does not love the dog. It is the first and strongest of a litter, whelped sooner than expected, owned by a friend of Madame’s. And even though the dog is lively and strong, it is a nuisance that will never make it to the show circuit because of the circumstances of its birth. It has a tight few purposes it can serve and should be grateful Madame is hosting it at all.

Madame says this while she explains the dog’s presence to Viktor one day, while they sip tea in the drawing room of the apartment she shares with Coach Yakov, and now with Viktor too. He hears her words and her meaning underneath. He winks at her and performs every exercise she can create for him flawlessly the next day in the cold studio behind the rink offices. She says nothing in the cab on the ride back to her (their) building.

Viktor might be a nuisance, but he’s already on the show circuit and he plans to own it until it damn well pleases him to stop.

The days begin to blend into one another in an endless pattern of practice and competition, the barre and the ice. And the dog, Viktor’s shadow at the apartment when all he wants is to be alone until the next day begins. He shuts his door in the dog’s face nightly and privately agrees with Madame that the thing is too stupid to be of any use.

He wins Junior Nationals.

He starts running to and from the rink when the weather turns. He stops needing Coach Yakov to rap on his door in the mornings and threaten to deny him ice time. He even stops pretending to oversleep, the ice more important than a silly secondary school game like that. And most of all he ignores the dog as best he can during those first days after everything and nothing changes.

\---

He watches Europeans because several of Coach Yakov’s skaters are competing there, and knows he could beat them all. Not could. Not in a few years. If they would let him, Viktor could beat them _now_.

\---

Coach Yakov does not want to keep the dog and that is reason enough for Viktor to decorate his face with a smile and graciously request for Makkachin to be allowed to sleep in his room.

Madame likes dogs, inasmuch as they obey her orders. Madame demands obedience. She does not smile when Viktor allows Makkachin to jump up onto his bed, but he thinks he sees a grim approval in her eyes when he begins reading the Lokhvitskaya she assigned to him out loud to the dog. Or, to Makkachin, rather. Makkachin has a silly, pointless name that suits it. Her. And Viktor still doesn’t love her, but he finds Makkachin at least a little pleasant.

“Tumble down like a star of gold,” he recites to Makkachin, who stares up at Viktor, and stares and stares. “I’d rather die young.”

Makkachin whines until Viktor clumsily scratches her belly. She pants a smile then, inordinately pleased by something so simple that it makes Viktor a little angry. She shouldn’t enjoy Viktor’s halfhearted attention so much. She should expect as much from him as Viktor expects from himself.

(She’s warm to sleep next to. That is one thing Viktor likes about her.)

\---

Slowly, Viktor begins to care for the dog.

\---

When he’s younger – a dreaming Junior, a rookie - he expects momentous change the first time he takes gold as a senior at the Grand Prix Final. Instead it’s another fact of the day. He realizes it will happen after he touches down cleanly from his last combination, triple flip triple toe, and sums up the points in his head while he wraps up the rest of his performance in a neat set of turns. He realizes he’s untouchable when he rises from the sit spin. He realizes it’s not enough when he finally stops and the music stops with him and the crowd begins to tell him what they think of him.

Their appreciation falls in waves of flowers and shouts and banners striped in his country’s colors. And because Viktor has – finally, according to Madame – learned how to be clever, the crowd shows their love by showering the ice in a rain of stuffed poodles too. Makkachin has been a star in her own right for a few years, now, ever since Yakov first started to grouch about Viktor keeping himself busy while recovering from what he did to his knee.

The way Viktor would have preferred to keep busy was out of the question. Banned from the ice, Viktor ladened all his attentions on Makkachin; his roommate, his confidante, his best and oldest friend. Makkachin would have let him enter the rink if it were up to her. Makkachin would do anything Viktor wanted her to do, and what she does is appear in all of Viktor’s videos and social media posts for three long months.

She continues to feature in about 80% of them even after Viktor’s physical therapy winds down.

The internet likes dogs, as it turns out. Viktor does not, usually, but he makes an exception for Makkachin. He leaves that fact out of his videos, because the internet likes dogs, and his fans like dogs, and Viktor wants as much support as he can get. He wants to be the kind of man who likes cute things and is liked by cute things. That kind of person matches the rest of his image, he thinks, so he works to make himself seamless. He begins sharing pictures of other dogs on his accounts. They all come up short against Makkachin, but when Viktor says it like that he knows people think he means something different than what he does, that other dogs are loud and smelly and troublesome.

Yakov helps him license Makkachin plush toys even though the FFKK says it’s ridiculous.

They stop saying it’s ridiculous after Worlds that year when the BBC runs an article on just how many poodle plushes Viktor donates to charity after his record-breaking win. It’s sweet to see them back down, since they never used to when Viktor was shorter and his hair was longer. It’s always sweet when Viktor wins.

After the plush poodles come the posters and the wallets and the phone cases. He even sees other skaters begin to carry them. He doesn’t know what to do with that.

He asks Makkachin, which has become his natural response.

She snuffles at him and presses her cold nose against his neck.

He apologizes for being away so frequently.

\---

As the years pass, Viktor forgets Makkachin was ever ‘the dog’ to him. He forgets he doesn’t care for dogs in general, because after pretending for so long he finds he can’t remember what his own opinions are. But does it matter? He is a king; in love with his realm, bored with the world like royalty tends to be. In May he conquers Worlds a third time over. It's not a record on its own again, but he can already feel in his bones it's part of an ongoing one. He knows he's going to win again next year, and probably the next after, and those will be records to match his scores.

He gets up before dawn even on his rest days so Makkachin can have a consistent breakfast time and a consistent walk after. He skates when it makes sense to skate. He sees his rink mates more than ever, though seeing is mostly watching them watch him.

He keeps a tasteful number of oversize books on his coffee table and on the shelf in his designer living room in case anyone stops by; in any event, his worn favorites all sit in the stacks beside his bed. Madame’s forced poetry wasn’t all so bad as he thought it would be when he was fifteen. And maybe the hard books are a little too ambitious for him, the university texts, bound up with complexities he knows are there but can’t quite decipher on his own, but he finds more and more that he wants to try to unravel.

Generally he stops after a few pages and turns to a different text, hopeful this time he’ll be able to master the lines without getting frustrated midway through. If only the subjects were closer to the things he knows well. He thinks he could write a thousand words, a thousand pages, about the placement of the shoulders in a correct Ina Bauer, a thousand books about the arch of the back. But when he opens the notes app on his phone he can’t think of anything beyond the feeling of rightness he has when he does it correctly, and a motion will never be a thesis. He stops trying. He’s not one to beat himself up over things that don’t matter.

What guests he does allow in his home laugh when they see the bookshelf next to his kitchen.

“You’re a dear, Vitya,” they say. “Did someone give you those?”

“They’re Makkachin’s,” he responds breezily.

They share the next laugh because it was the correct, witty thing to say.

(He tries to memorize the date of the Battle of Smolensk again, out of spite, until he realizes there has been more than one.)

 ---

“You’re the smartest aren’t you, Makka,” he says when she wags her tail after he opens one of those big showy books up and begins to read to her. Reading time on the couch is something they do after long days. The dog behaviorist Viktor hired says it’s important to stimulate Makkachin’s mind. “I’m so sorry, yes, my sweet girl, you’re the smartest and the loveliest and the best.”

Makkachin barks in agreement and snuggles closer to his side. She paws at the pages when she wants him to turn them faster. Her favorite is The Fashion Book. Viktor is secretly glad, because if her favorite were The Brothers Karamazov he might trip up over the passages and the words.

\---

He wins for the fourth time in a row; everything, that is, he wins everything. The party Yakov lets him throw is spectacular, close enough to the line between tasteful and not that Chris slips one hundred Euros into Viktor’s back pocket during the middle of it because he bet Viktor wouldn’t be able to pull it off. Viktor spends that hundred Euros later that night at some bar or another, deep and dizzy in his after after after party. When he stumbles back to his hotel room he’s alone. There’s another hundred Euros Chris owes him, that man of terribly little faith. Viktor will have to fly to Geneva to collect. And Chris is supposed to be his friend! Makkachin would never bet against Viktor. Makkachin always supports Viktor, _always_ , and he wishes she were there so he could tell her so and thank her. He does the next best thing and calls the landline he bought just so he could talk to Makkachin through the answering machine.

“I love you,” he tells her just before he hangs up, and he’s never meant it more.

In the morning he remembers Makkachin is at her kennel, like she always is when he’s away for more than a night or two. The machine transmitted his words to the empty dark and he’ll delete them when he gets home without playing them. It’s fine. He knows she knows. She’s the most important woman who will ever be in his life, more important than his mother or Madame or his sponsors or anyone at all, and it’s because she misses him when he’s not there.

Water.

He closes his eyes and grabs an Evian from the minifridge and gathers his thoughts back together like he does before competitions. He doesn’t give them a choice. When he opens his eyes again he’s ready to ready himself for the wall of journalists that will inevitably be in the lobby.

He’s a professional at making himself look presentable by now. Surely enough, when the elevator opens for him on the ground floor a dozen flashes go off simultaneously. He smiles. If any of them suspects he’s had any fun at all in the past twelve hours they’re even better actors than he is.

“You’ll just have to wait and see,” he tells them when they ask about next year’s programs.

He doesn’t answer the retirement questions. Yakov takes care of glaring at those reporters for him, as always, and as always Viktor is grateful for how well Yakov understands him.

\---

That summer two things happen.

(More than two things happen. Two important things happen.)

Viktor composes a program about loneliness and longing, and can’t tell whether he’s refusing to admit to himself why he’s done it or if he just doesn’t know. Dramatic programs do better than light ones anyway, historically, on average. They have passion. Viktor has passion. He does.

Viktor also finds a website.

Even he knows it’s a scam, and worthless, and probably going to lead to identity fraud. He signs up with Georgi’s credit card to be safe. They promise to ship to his (Georgi’s) home within three weeks. He waits.

Four weeks later he blithely steals a large manila folder out of the row of mailboxes on the ground floor of Georgi’s apartment building and says a silent thank you to his rink mate. He’s had the mail keys for as long as he’s had Georgi’s apartment keys – years – and he mostly hasn’t abused that trust in all that time. Georgi has a copy of his keys too for when Makkachin needs looking after when Viktor goes on short trips, and Georgi has brought dates up to Viktor’s place, so. Their score is made even by the mail fraud.

Makkachin throws herself at Viktor when he walks in the door. She doesn’t usually. She’s a very well-behaved, well-trained dog. Madame made sure of that when she was a puppy. She must smell the excitement rolling off Viktor as he unwraps his spring coat and unties his shoes.

He can’t blame her. Normally he’s a good actor, or, good enough to carry a performance and net a high PCS, but right now he’s visibly giddy, he’s sure.

Before he sets up his phone, he presents her with the certificate off-camera. It’s more special that way.

“Doctor of Particle Physics,” Viktor reads the certificate aloud so Makkachin will know what she’s achieved. He’s proud of her, and loves her, and is jealous of her too even though that’s the most unreasonable part about this entire folly. “Valedictorian.”

She pants happily and lets him fix a sash around her shoulders, lets him balance a crown of flowers on the top of her head. Blue roses, because even if Viktor hasn’t had a literature class in eleven years he still knows the importance of recurring themes. When Viktor records a little ceremony for her it nets twenty thousand hits in the first day.

Next he’ll see about a literature degree for her, he thinks. Russian literature. It will be awful for him, but all the suffering will be good research for the next season and _Stammi Vicino_ and his theme. Even if he only makes it through a few chapters. He doesn’t think Makkachin will mind skipping around too much.

She’s such a good friend. She never does.

\---

His fans think Makkachin’s degree is adorable. Yakov rolls his eyes and grumbles about antics. Viktor lands his signature jump three quarters of the time in practice. He watches the aftermath of Yakov and Madame’s fights to sample a different version of longing. He decides he likes his version better.

\---

He wins again, that winter. He wins everything but a phone number and a call.

\---

He flies to Japan the next spring.

\---

He flies back.

\---

“It’s not that impressive,” Yuuri demurs. He never lets Viktor praise him properly, even when it’s not about skating, where he covers his ears and hums club pop rather than hear Viktor say he’s the best in the world even when it’s true.

“ _I_ think it’s impressive,” Viktor stabs back.

They’re lying on the couch, a different one from the one Viktor used to have. This one is deep green and soft, and wide enough that it’s comfortable to sleep on if two men and a dog don’t feel like getting up to properly go to bed. Viktor likes this couch so much better than the one he had before. He likes this life so much better than the one he had before Yuuri. He can’t stop thinking about that.

“Are you looking at your ring again?” Yuuri’s breath warms Viktor’s ear. His rosy red cheeks warm Viktor’s shoulder. “You can’t read if you’re looking at your hand.”

Of course Viktor is looking at his ring again. Yuuri won All-Japan, but is refusing to let it count. (“I’ll win gold in a competition where the ISU recognizes the scores. Nationals is too kind to me.”) He’s making Viktor wait until Four Continents! He changed Viktor’s Pinterest password and won’t tell him what it is, so Viktor’s had to resort to scrapbooking wedding ideas the old way, and the paste fumes are probably going to lead him to an early death. An unmarried, bachelor death, probably in the snow somewhere outside Saint Petersburg, alone and unwed.

“I could have been looking at your hand.”

“Were you?”

Makkachin sneezes between them and Viktor hurries to apologize for making her wait. His heart bursts when Yuuri beats him to it. It tears right in two.

Tonight they’re reading _Guri to Gura_. Viktor refuses to let his Japanese lapse, and Makkachin became partial to Yuuri’s childhood picture books when they stayed at Yutopia. She wags her tail along with Viktor’s heartbeat, and, eventually, with Yuuri’s snickering.

“I’m sorry,” he says. He says it in the cutest shaky Russian Viktor’s ever heard, so Viktor can’t even be mad at him. Unfair. “It’s just. Your accent is so…”

Bad. Viktor’s Japanese is terrible. Viktor’s Japanese is self-taught, and Viktor’s only had to learn Salchows and Flips for thirteen years, and even when he was learning other things he was bad at them because they weren’t Salchows and Flips and Axels and Loops. Viktor thinks about apologizing even though that’s silly.

“…Saga. So Saga.”

Viktor doesn’t understand.

“You sound like an innkeeper,” Yuuri clarifies.

“I take that as a compliment,” Viktor sniffs. “Some of the best people I know own an inn.”

Yuuri goes redder at that. Makkachin wriggles and paws at the page.

Later, because even when Viktor sleeps on the sofa he’s damned if he’ll fall asleep before washing his face properly, they stand next to each other in their bathroom and Yuuri brushes his teeth while Viktor applies his anti-ageing serum.

“I’m thinking of tearing down that wall there,” Viktor gestures to the side with his applicator. Yuuri squints at him, glasses balancing low on the tip of his nose. “That way we can have two sinks. One for me and one for you! And much more counter space.”

Yuuri blinks and shrugs and Viktor for one moment wonders if he’s just done something wrong. He lets out a breath. The moment passes.

“Sure,” Yuuri says. He wipes his glasses against his shirt and splashes his face with cold water. Viktor’s told him it’s terrible for his skin, but Yuuri’s skin refuses to listen. “You know I meant it, before.”

“Hm?”

“My degrees. Sports medicine and business? It’s not that impressive. I did the bare minimum to pass and it took me five years instead of four.” He shimmies out of his pants and into a flannel pair someone gave Viktor at some point when lumberjacks were back in. Maybe 2012. Who knows. “The only reason I didn’t have to repeat more than a couple of classes was that the teachers felt bad for me.”

Viktor stops him with a palm flat over his mouth. It’s a gesture he learned from Yuuri. It means ‘ _I love you but I can’t keep listening to the garbage flowing from your mouth._ ’ “Don’t say that,” he frowns. “You’ve been a top-ranked international athlete for years--”

“No I—”

“I’ll bring the ranking up on my phone, my treasure, I’ll paste it above the bed. I have plenty of paste since you won’t _marry_ me.”

“You—”

Yuuri shoves at Viktor’s hand. Viktor grabs him by the waist, pinning his arms to his sides. Yuuri’s struggling does not match how much Viktor’s seen him lift in the weight room. His protests do not do his biceps justice, but they are still protests. (Yuuri steps on Viktor’s foot when he loosens his grip, _hard_ , so Viktor carries on.)

“As I was saying, bunny, you’ve been top-ranked by the ISU for years and you still went to college and got two degrees on top of that! It’s the most impressive thing I’ve ever heard and I want to brag about you and how smart you are to everyone and you won’t _let_ me and it’s awful.”

Yuuri licks his hand.

Viktor, understandably, gets distracted.

\---

And even later still, when they’ve made it to bed, Yuuri turns out the lights and doesn’t let Viktor have a moment of peace before he rips his heart apart again. “You know how ridiculous you sound, don’t you?” he asks quietly, because Makkachin has already fallen asleep and Yuuri doesn’t want to wake her.

Viktor does not deign that question with an answer anymore.

“Even your skating aside,” Yuuri says, which is clearly quite difficult for him, “what I’ve done isn’t as impressive as what you’ve done. So I should get to brag first, before you do.”

Yuuri draws a character on Viktor’s bare chest with his finger. It’s an easy one: love.

Then: pride.

“You taught yourself three languages. You’ve been in Forbes four times because of your businesses.”

Then: wisdom.

“You know more about Japanese folklore than I do, and I had to take extra lessons so I could tell it to the tourists in English.”

Then: love, again. Respect.

“Do you regret not finishing school?”

Viktor doesn’t know he’s going to say, “…no,” until he does. It’s what he’s always said. It’s what he’s always meant. But this time he means it in a different way, not because he clearly needed to do it to become the living legend he supposedly is. Because, eventually, it made him happy. He’s happy. Everything that came before Yuuri led to Yuuri, and with Yuuri Viktor is so happy he thinks he’ll faint dead away.

“You should read to me,” Yuuri whispers. “From the books in here. So I can improve my Russian.”

Then: love, again. Love, love. Happiness.

Viktor’s throat goes tight. He controls it like he used to have to before press conferences. “As your coach I suppose I should make sure you’re well-rounded,” he says. “We’ll start tomorrow.”

Yuuri nods.

They drift into their dreams then, Makkachin sleeping softly between them.

**Author's Note:**

> \-- Do I think coaches can just check children out of Russian boarding school like library books? Maybe I do. Whatchu gonna do about it?
> 
> \-- Mirra Aleksandrovna Lokhvitskaya, “the Russian Sappho”, fit the general feeling I was going for in my hot five seconds of googling Russian poets for Lilia to make Viktor read. (HEY SHE SUPPORTED THE BONDAGE OUTFIT.) The words Viktor recites are from Wikipedia, so. I had a hard time finding more than that in English. Feel free to drop some knowledge if you know more about her or can point me towards her full poems.
> 
> \-- Yuuri’s minor was probably Russian or Russian Studies that fanboy. Viktor reading him Tolstoy in bed is probably in his top 20 dirty fantasies.


End file.
